Month: January 2017

There currently seems to be an issue in Dynamics 365 Online, where you can see notes in area in the custom entity, but cannot create new notes. I could reproduce this issue in this version -> Version 1612 (8.2.0.773) (DB 8.2.0.764)

This is how the notes area looks in a custom entity. There is no header area to create new notes.

Compare this with the contact entity.

As you can see, there is a textarea to create new notes, which seems to be missing in the custom entity. I looked into this using DevTools, and it appears to be display issue, as the DOM elements for creating the notes are still there. I quickly wrote this bookmarklet to temporarily show the create new notes text area in the form.

I am not sure what sets the “display” property to none. When the DOM element is initially created, it is created without the “display” property set and then some event handler appears to be modifying this. I set a DOM breakpoint on “Attributes modifications”, but the breakpoint is not retained when I refresh the page, and hence I am unable to catch the “display: none” being set on “#notesWall div.header”. I spent some time to investigate this from the pretty-printed source, but could not figure it out.

You can easily execute fetchxml in WebAPI using the “fetchXml” query parameter. But this “GET” method won’t work, if the fetchxml is too big. In this case, you have to use the “POST” method to execute the fetchxml.

I was going through the FetchXML schema and found these two interesting attributes. The first one is “utc-offset” on the “fetch” node.

The other one is “usertimezone” on the “attribute” node.

Both these attributes give an impression, that it is possible to return datetime attributes in a different timezone instead of UTC, but in reality they don’t seem to do anything.

The only way to return datetime in the user’s local timezone, is by using the deprecated ExecuteFetchRequest. I will demonstrate this with XrmToolBox. This is my simple fetch query.

Below is the raw fetch result

Below is the table grid result

I execute the FetchXML using the FetchXML Builder tool. As you can see, the datetime values are different. This is because when you use “RetrieveMultiple” to execute the fetch query, the datetime returned is always UTC and has to be converted to the local timezone. ExecuteFetchRequest is now deprecated and RetrieveMultiple is the recommended way to execute fetchxml. These two points really puzzle me:

Why user-timezone and utc-offset don’t seem to do anything. Are they internally used?

Why MS decided to change the datetime behaviour

So, this is a good point to remember when you are executing fetchxml using “FetchXML Tester” or have set the Result view to Raw fetch result in “FetchXML Builder” or using a mixture of ExecuteFetchRequest and RetrieveMultiple in your code.